Why do we get 'greenwashing' instead of better products?

October 12, 2023 6:23 PM

The host of YouTube channel driving 4 answers spends most of his time explaining the technical details of internal combustion engines in great detail and documenting the seemingly endless build and rebuild of his Toyota MR2 in a garage in Sarajevo. The channel also branches out into his adventures with motorcycles and bicycles, but mostly stays in the technical realm. The latest video from the channel, though, while starting by talking about Formula 1, diverts to talking about how the automotive industry pretends to be 'going green' but isn't, the right to repair debate, the problem with capitalism and suggests a rational approach to it all. [SLYT 23 minutes]
posted by dg (23 comments total)

Spoiler: the rational approach to it all is "dismantle capitalism and embrace communism". Uhm no thanks, we already beat the communist insurgency in our country.

Ultimately the customer cares about the total cost of ownership (purchase + lifetime repairs), and indirectly this also optimizes emissions and resources consumed because they also scale with the value of industrial activity (manufacturing GDP)

Here's a common decision matrix in engineering - if using a single piece casting results in a product that is 50% cheaper to manufacture, and has a 90% lower chance of needing repair and thus roughly twice the usable life for the consumer, then even if the part can't be repaired in the event of damage, it will statistically result in less total lifetime emissions / resources consumed over the entire population of products. It will be cheaper for the customer, and better for the environment.

Remember, repairing a product involves an entire supply chain as well that is very inefficient - I might have to courier the broken product to a warehouse, from there on a plane to Hong Kong then China, then back again by several trucks and planes to my house.

A $1 part that is used in mass manufacturing will cost about $5 to manufacture if used in an aftermarket/repair capacity because you don't ship them per thousand loose in reusable metal boxes, you would need to package each one individually in plastic with enough anti-moisture / corrosion measures that they have a shelf life of 5-10 years, then individually pack / stack them in the warehouse by hand. They then get sold and shipped to a tier 1 distributor, who stores it in their warehouse, who then sells and ships it to a tier 2 distributor, who stores it in their warehouse, who sells and ships it to a tier 3 retailer / dealer / repairer who finally sells it to you or uses it in your repair. At this point the part usually costs about $50, because you're paying for an astronomical amount of warehousing, freight, and packaging - and that's $50 of emissions as well, compared to just the $1 worth of emissions in the original part.

Far better to simply design a product that does not fail, which unfortunately conflicts with the ease of repair.

The thing with BMW is a similar kind of optimization. Yes, you get lower material usage if you build two vehicles, one with heated seats and one without. But then you run into all kinds of inefficiencies elsewhere due to complexity. Let's say you already have 200 different seats due to permutations of leather vs cloth, different grades of leather and cloth, manual vs automatic, various levels of position memory and movement complexity, different weather conditions, different crash test requirements. Remember this one factory is serving 100-120 countries around the world with their unique requirements, some hot and some cold countries. Now you want heated vs non heated seats, you double that to 400 different seats. You can't handle that in one assembly line, so the supplier needs to build a second assembly line, and now you need machines to produce different mouldings, wires, components. Not enough room, so they need to build a factory extension. More complexity means more errors, which means more wastage and parts rejected / thrown out. Logistics is made much more complex, you need to upgrade your warehouses to handle the increased complexity. At some point the parts get so complex you need to transition from bulk shipment to just in time sequenced shipping, which makes supply chains more brittle and prone to disruption.
posted by xdvesper at 7:12 PM on October 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

Remember, repairing a product involves an entire supply chain as well that is very inefficient

True, unless the product is built to broadly applied standards using commonly available parts, available over a long period of time. I am currently repairing a drill press made in 1954 and all the parts I need are still available from stock from industrial suppliers, despite this country having moved to metric in the intervening 70-ish years. Whether the original manufacturer is still around or not is irrelevant.

Less obscurely, and while this glosses over a lot of bad behaviour from manufacturers, bikes for a long time have been roughly standards compliant and it's generally been possible over a period of 40 years or more to repair them without regard for who made them in the first place. That they are moving away from that at the moment is much more the result of greed and the desire for consumer lock in than necessity. That's mirrored in plenty of other industries.

Far better to simply design a product that does not fail, which unfortunately conflicts with the ease of repair.

Perhaps, though what is often designed is a product that both fails and is not possible to repair.

I don't disagree with your analysis of BMW except to note that the question of whether or not we actually need heated seats tends to be the point when I side with "dismantle capitalism" even if communism isn't the answer. Consumer capitalism is engaged in social engineering that promotes a desire for more after more after more - I don't know when heated seats became common but I'm sure they were regarded as a very novel, super luxury, selling point. As they become more standard the marketing department requires some other luxury new edge over the competition and so on it goes. Why would you design something to last 50 years, or to be repaired, if it won't be desired in 10?
posted by deadwax at 8:53 PM on October 12, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah, I don't see the sense in increasing the number of variants in a product to save minimal materials, but the idea of building features in a car then disabling them unless the owner pays an exorbitant monthly fee to make them work again is just bullshit. I guess there's some argument in the idea that this allows them to only charge people who want them for heated seats and those who don't want them don't pay for them. It's a bullshit argument, of course, because everyone who buys the car is paying for them then some are paying for them again and again and again.

Better still, don't build cars with heated seats in the first place! Maybe it just seems useless to me because I live in a subtropical climate, but they seem like nothing more than conspicuous consumption to me.

There are cases where it's definitely better to build parts as an assembly if you can actually make it more reliable, offsetting the higher cost of replacing an assembly vs an individual component through lower replacement intervals and also reducing the number of parts that have to be stocked. But something that wasn't mentioned that deadwax touches on above is that there are lots of parts where it makes absolutely no sense for every manufacturer to have different specifications for every model. For example, why does every car have to have a different stud pattern on the wheels? I know not 100% every car, but there's little cross-compatibility. Why do there have to be so many different batteries for cars? All this hyper-specialisation of what should be generic parts has, I think, a much greater impact than combining parts into assemblies, also adversely impacts the supply chain issues and increases costs to consumers.
posted by dg at 10:19 PM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

My current car is a stupid car (large, bad gas mileage, expensive to fix, etc), but it was cheap when I needed a cheap car. The original owner opted not to pay for heated seats, though the actual seats have the elements in them. I bought a replacement switch panel which had the switches in it off ebay and now I have heated seats. Which for this cold old man makes winter driving much nicer.

(This car is old enough there is no "connectivity" stuff in it. It still has a CD changer as the height of then in-car entertainment, which is nice as I still have CDs. So making the seats work was a simple mechanical problem, not something requiring paying for a service.)
posted by maxwelton at 10:48 PM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ultimately, the cars have heated seats - they have heating elements in the seats. BMW or whoever may have 'disabled' them, but they're just heating elements. If you can pass volts through them, they will heat the seats. There is a battery in the engine bay, and an alternator.

With a bit of will, they all have heated seats, BMW subscription or add-on fee or no.
posted by Dysk at 10:53 PM on October 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I find the actual costs of "waste" by centralizing manufacture at very efficient factories but then being essentially unable to repair stuff is tough to sort out. Certainly in terms of just labor costs there's all sorts of cheap-ish goods where it's just not plausible that a trained repairperson earning a plausible salary is going to be cheaper than just repairing it. Including total lifecycle costs, including disposal, changes the math towards more repairs than we currently do, but it's not clear to me how much.

In a perfect world, we could price waste disposal appropriately and the market would adjust appropriately to minimize environmental impact. Or, alternatively, in a perfect world people would be happy with efficient centralized planning made possible by modern computing. Either would be a fine solution, once we get that perfect world.

Spoiler: the rational approach to it all is "dismantle capitalism and embrace communism".

I'm assuming you turned it off when it got to that line? Because maybe 10 seconds he says that's not actually the issue and starts arguing its actually about the distribution of power.

Didn't love the video (and in fact stopped before finishing) but the point isn't to embrace communism.
posted by mark k at 11:01 PM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

dg, I need to apologize for my - on rereading - arrogant and hostile stream of consciousness reaction against the video, I think the person narrating the video just rubbed me the wrong way with their approach and I was reacting against them, not you. I will do better in the future.

On the topic of discriminatory pricing - generally, products are priced based on how much the customer values them, not what it actually cost to produce them. You're not paying what it costs to buy the product (witness the majority of EVs on the road that are not-Tesla being sold for staggering losses) - the customer pays according to what value they feel they are deriving from it, not what it cost to produce. If a customer wants a heated seat, they would be willing to pay more. The cost-side equation is for the manufacturer to optimize, the customer doesn't care about that at all.

I agree that heated seats is a luxury feature, but it does have a valid and practical purpose - air is a really poor conductor of heat, which is why you can stick your hand in a hot oven that is hundreds of degrees, but you can't pick up the pie you just cooked. Heated seats transmit heat to your body much better than air can. Making it worse, for cars driven in very cold countries, because their usual heating system uses waste heat from the engine, and there's no waste heat to be had from the engine for up to 10-15 minutes, while a heated seat can give you relief immediately.

As for unncessarily complexity... some of it is driven by product marketing, who want to create enough trim differentiation between the lower and higher specs to convince richer customers to part with their money. In the airline industry, for example, one stat I've seen is that 75% of the profits are driven by the 15% of business class customers. Some of the complexity is driven by genuine physical demands, not sure if you're talking about the 12V lead acid battery specifically but there would be 5-6 different types capable of handling different temperature ranges and salt / humidity conditions. The battery we would put on a car in Finland would be totally different to the one put in Saudi Arabia. There's some complexity that is just dumb (imo) because some studio designer thinks it looks better that way.

Some of us jokingly refer to Elon Musk are the hero of complexity reduction because he's the only one insane enough to force engineers and designers to do things "his way or the highway" - sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. They don't do trim levels - everyone gets the same features, no heated vs non-heated bullshit, while some manufacturers used to offer 5 different trim levels. The Cybertruck's incredibly stupid looks is actually one thing I'm a huge fan of, imagine how cheap and efficient building that would be, all straight flat surfaces, no curves (they just need to address the safety issue, maybe use normal steel instead). How the model 3 and Y don't have an instrument cluster at all. Like, if you wanted the ugliest, cheapest, least complex, most efficient and eco-friendly barebones car that exists, you'd just go out and copy a Tesla.
posted by xdvesper at 12:34 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

xdvesper: Spoiler: the rational approach to it all is "dismantle capitalism and embrace communism". Uhm no thanks, we already beat the communist insurgency in our country.
Supply chains are complex and we live individualistic lives, able to push the environmental impact or waste costs out-of-sight/out-of-mind. If not 'embrace communism', can we have some collective consciousness for the circumstances? Like your observation about total cost of ownership, how do I price-in to my purchases that we live in a closed loop of the planet's ecosystem where chemicals not allowed in my back yard (NIMBY) are used freely in products I buy that are assembled in someone else's back yard?

dg: Better still, don't build cars with heated seats in the first place! Maybe it just seems useless to me because I live in a subtropical climate, but they seem like nothing more than conspicuous consumption to me.
We probably can make do without, but subtropical places aren't protected from climate chaos as seen in the ice sheets in Texas last year. I would want that uniformity mentioned in this thread: a common and replaceable part.

Right to repair is a good label, I've not seen a single comment on it that connects USA Design Patent or Europe-wide Industrial Design rights that expire after a limited span and have a carve-out for fitting replacement parts to protected assemblies. It is complicated by recent updates to treaties allowing alleged counterfeit items to be seized at borders ahead of court decisions. Can we talk about being bullied out of repairing your goods or running a service to repair for others because the source manufacturers have more money for lobbyists and lawyers?

xdvesper: The Cybertruck's incredibly stupid looks is actually one thing I'm a huge fan of, imagine how cheap and efficient building that would be, all straight flat surfaces, no curves (they just need to address the safety issue, maybe use normal steel instead).
Stainless steel rarely makes a uniform mix of chrome, molybdenum, nickel and iron, so over time the iron rusts and the stains appear. I think it's simple, and I think I would still discount naked stainless steel for a vehicle unless you had zero other technology to protect the metals and prevent corrosion.
posted by k3ninho at 1:08 AM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

dg, I need to apologize for my - on rereading - arrogant and hostile stream
Absolutely no need for apology, but thanks.
posted by dg at 2:37 AM on October 13, 2023

Heated seats means I don't have to heat the whole cabin as much in winter, so I can go a bit further on a charge.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:27 AM on October 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

You will be warmed much more effectively in a cold room by wrapping yourself in a 100W electric blanket than by plugging in a 1200W space heater. The difference is ridiculous!

Arguably, the wasteful feature in an electric car would be to have cabin heating at all, instead of just heated seats. Cabin heating is practical for IC engine cars because it’s literally recycling waste heat.

Now, an electric car without cabin heating would still need some way to deal with window defrosting but that’s honestly a different engineering issue entirely.
posted by notoriety public at 7:38 AM on October 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

From experience in vehicles with varying levels of fancitude and decrepitude, you need to heat the steering wheel, too.
The windshield also needs a stream of dry air hitting it. Electric defrosting wires work to melt ice, but you still can't see.
posted by Acari at 8:48 AM on October 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Interesting. I wonder if cabin heating in electric cars is ultimately a combination of “it solves a couple of practical problems, plus the customer base will whine and refuse to buy our cars if we don’t have it, so we don’t really have much of a choice anyway.”
posted by notoriety public at 9:15 AM on October 13, 2023

EVs also need heating and cooling available to keep the batteries happy, so the components (often a heat pump) are there anyway.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:27 AM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I hate heated seats. They make me feel like I'm sitting on a recently vacated toilet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:37 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nevermind heated seats: Air Conditioning in cars is completely silly. You can just open the windows and get a breeze, saving on the weight of the Air Conditioner.

And it only gets hot enough to need an Air Conditioner for a few months every year if you live in a sub-arctic location.
posted by NotAYakk at 1:09 PM on October 13, 2023

And it only gets hot enough to need an Air Conditioner for a few months every year if you live in a sub-arctic location.

And heated seats are far more simple and reliable than an air conditioning system, so if we could somehow turn back global warming into global cooling, we could save like 200lbs of weight per 5000lb car.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:24 PM on October 13, 2023

I hesitate to continue a side-conversation, but for those of us with kids, heated seats are not a viable substitute for heat, as kids are in boosters (and thus not in contact with the seat) for a decade. And I'm not rolling down the windows for climate control driving at 50+ mph with a preschooler.

Which is sort of emblematic of the "there are non-edge cases for many features, even if they're not your experience" problem
posted by DebetEsse at 4:28 PM on October 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

imagine how cheap and efficient building that would be, all straight flat surfaces, no curves

Car panels are always curved because it makes them incredibly strong and stiff for their minuscule thickness. Flat panels need to be much much thicker and heavier to come close, and will still show imperfections and dings much more readily.

They're stamped out of sheet steel, which is just about the cheapest way to manufacture anything.
posted by grahamparks at 4:56 PM on October 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

imagine how cheap and efficient building that would be, all straight flat surfaces, no curves

Aerodynamic drag is likely to be pretty terrible on something that's all straight lines and harsh angles. And it'll get even worse as the floppy flat panels take a few dings.
posted by Dysk at 11:39 PM on October 13, 2023

I hate heated seats. They make me feel like I'm sitting on a recently vacated toilet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:37 PM on October 13 [+] [!]

Eponysterical.
posted by Wild_Eep at 7:22 AM on October 16, 2023

Suggesting that anything from Tesla is "simple" is funny given that you can't even open the glove box without going through a computer system to do so, rather than a simple latch.
posted by drstrangelove at 10:58 AM on October 16, 2023

Heated seats aren't something that's recent--- Cadillac introduced them as an option in the mid-60s and Saab was using them in the early 70s.
posted by drstrangelove at 11:03 AM on October 16, 2023